Over the last few months, you’ve been following our story as Julio and I spent months navigating the Toronto housing market in collaboration with Engel & Völkers. Our mission: to find a family-friendly unit that would be the perfect starter home for Canela, Julio and I as we expand our growing family (yes, you read that right!). We learned quickly that family-friendly units in Toronto are in short supply. Our real estate advisor, Shawn Blander, of Engel & Völkers Toronto Uptown proved to be an asset in a market that is really competitive right now, but we’ll get to that later. After months of searching, we’re SO excited to announce that we finally found the perfect home! Just in time to be the best Christmas present from ourselves to ourselves.

Rewind! You’ll remember that back in June, Julio and I started working with the team at Engel & Völkers. We chose them because Engel & Völkers believes luxury is personal and all about the experiences we want to achieve in the place we called “home” – something we really value. In our case, they completely understood what we were looking for and presented us with precisely the right types of properties based on our personalized needs, all in an efficient manner that fit in with our crazy schedules. Overall, it was a great experience with Shawn acting as an amazing consultant and partner throughout our journey.

A post shared by Do The Daniel (@dothedaniel) on Jul 12, 2017 at 12:49pm PDT

This year, Engel & Völkers was the first to make VR tech a standard at across its North America shops. This means that we were able to browse 3D listings at Engel & Völkers’ Toronto Uptown shop andremotely using the immoviewer app and Google cardboard glasses.

What we couldn’t have known about the Toronto real estate market is how competitive it truly is. As a city, Toronto is in an exciting growth phase, however two and three bedroom units, designed for millennials entering child-rearing years are in short supply. This summer we dealt with competition, crazy overbidding, and many other situations that we didn’t see coming. I can honestly say that we learned the true advantage of working with a service-first brand like Engel & Völkers. At the end of it all, when our deal was signed we received a note from the property’s listing agent that we thought would be nice to share with you. While there were multiple offers on the property, with two others wanting to come in higher, the owners ultimately decided to accept our offer because they felt better working with us and our agent. Not only did Engel & Völkers do an incredible job in representing us to secure the property, they even negotiated a better price than we expected!

And just like that my friends, we received the call that the house was ours. I am beyond excited to be moving from our current condo in Liberty Village to an entire house. We now have space to grow into. A second bedroom to make into an office, and one day a nursery. Most importantly, a new neighbourhood to explore and fall in love with. The house is also located close to Julio’s family – another bonus! Having moved more times than I care to admit in the years that I have lived on my own and with roommates, I can say with certainty that this has been the best experience to date. With the help of Shawn and the Engel & Völkers team, we found our dream home and can now proceed into the next chapter of our lives.

For those of you also looking for a new home in Canada, I encourage you to check out the Engel & Völkers website today. For our readers outside of Canada, Engel & Völkers has a global network that spans more than 30 countries. And of course, don’t forget to follow along in the excitement of finding a new home with us by following @EVAmericas on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Use and follow #EVAmericas to see and share beautiful houses around the world.

For more behind the scenes of this and other amazing brands we are working with around the world, make sure to follow along with the #DoTheDaniel Instagram account. We would love to have you join on our adventures!